Let AI Make Your Summer Holiday Breezy: Week 3

Summer is in full swing. It might be cold and rainy outside, but the sun is shining somewhere. As part of our Summer Series promotion, we’ve been looking at how AI can make your travels that bit easier, and you can see how we helped you out with your accommodation booking and pre-travel organisation.

Save 25% on any 2018 Summit when you register in August using the code SUMMER.

So you’ve booked everything, you’re all packed, and now you’re actually on holiday. Whilst you’re away you’ll inevitably want to explore, treat yourself, be treated(!). Whether that’s to nice dinners, day trips, beach activities, or museums these things can add up quickly. It’s no fun to be counting the pennies, trying to calculate the exchange rate, and worrying how much you’re spending, or worst of all having your card declined.

But sometimes these things are unavoidable. You forgot to tell your bank you were going away, your card thinks there’s suspicious activity on your account, you’re miles away from a bank and can’t fathom what’s going on - what do you do? Call up the fraud hotline. Nope. Not fun. If you’ve ever experienced this before you know you’ll be on hold for hours, racking up a huge phone bill.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could speak to an AI Assistant that could resolve your hiccup in seconds?

Clare.AI have built an end-to-end digital assistant solution powered by AI and natural language processing (NLP) that can understand your exact issue and assist the customer in whichever way it sees fit. Their platform allows banks to help customers manage their personal finance, enhances customer service from any location at any time without having to wait to be connected to a customer service assistant. The model is trained with real data from the financial industry, which makes the assistant familiar with the customer’s needs and issues. Additionally, Clare.AI isn’t limited to your bank's online chat system, it’s integrated with the most popular IM platforms such as Facebook Messenger, Skype, SMS, iOS apps, Android apps, and even Amazon Alexa.

Credit card kerfuffle, solved. Time to explore the surrounding areas.

Whether you’re in a city, in the mountain or on the coast, there’s bound to be an abundance of wildlife to explore. Day trips to the zoo, peak to peak hikes, and dips in the sea all sound pretty appealing, but how often do you stop to think about the conservation of these animals and landscapes? Conservationists have been working for years to preserve our planet and the creatures that live in it, but it can be a rather laborious task.

Look out of your holiday home window and the chances are there are hundreds of different plants, animals and landscapes - essentially the potential for deep and rigorous data sets is huge. Conservation Metrics are improving conservation through better monitoring by providing powerful new tools to monitor wildlife status, distribution, and population trends. Recent advances in sensor network technology, machine learning, and Big Data analytics can provide accurate and cost-effective tools for monitoring biodiversity at scale. The reality of endangered species is ever present, and when you’re planning your travels to remote corners of the globe to spot wildlife spectacles, you don’t want it to be the last time you’re given the opportunity to do so.

We were joined by David Klein, Lead AI Developer at Conservation Metrics who spoke about their technical approach and presented several working case studies that show how deep learning can empower biologists to analyze petabytes of sensor data from microphones and cameras in remote corners of the world. You can watch his presentation from the Deep Learning Summit in Boston here.

Whilst you’re exploring what your destination has to offer, what better souvenir of the landscape to take home than photographs? Next week we’ll continue the summer special series with a look at how AI can help you take home the best memories from your trip.